09 - THE FORM
Plato Rivellis: I believe that this photograph of a hungry child from Africa taken by the very significant photographer Sebastiao Salgado will move almost anyone who sees it. However, I am moved by the fact undeniably repelled by the photograph. I think the reason is that this particular esteemed photographer used form in a wrong way, which we will see later, and gave disproportionate importance to the formalism of the photograph.
Andreas Pagoulatos: I agree with you, Plato. I feel that this hypertrophy of form, the great anxiety for a form as beautiful as possible if you will, clashes with the tragedy of the moment. And this, in my opinion, brings us to the problem of having a photograph that is not only unethical but also, I would say, aesthetically repugnant. Because this struggle within the photograph between a tragic content and a "beautiful" form, again in quotes, are two opposing things that cause more turmoil and make us feel awkward.
PR: The word formalism, after all, as I believe, and most titles of trends in art have a rather negative meaning. That is, they imply an exaggeration towards a direction that may end up expressing a movement with all its positive elements but usually have emerged. These terms have arisen from the critics of specific artists. Therefore, in my mind, the word formalism means someone who exaggerates towards the direction of form. An important element that someone who starts to deal with photography as art should understand is that perhaps in all art lurk two threats that will prevent the real perception and enjoyment of the viewer. The first is the one that binds him with the theme, this is obvious, that is, the viewer initially will be charmed by what the photograph depicts. Once he surpasses this initial stage of contact with the photograph and reading, the next immediate one is the recognition of the form. That is how things were placed within the image. And this often in combination with a primary and primordial symbolism. Those are understood. The next stage is the difficult one. When these disappear and become content. If the form does not become content, it is a bad form within quotes. The search for form is directed towards creating a substance, not a composition. A work that is a composition is a crippled work.
AP: However, I feel that the viewer or reader of a work perceives things more through the form. That is, the first thing he feels is the form. To reach the content, and I am talking about great works of art, he must go through the form. What I say about form, there are cases where it is so integrated into the content that you sometimes do not perceive it. Other times again in significant and great works of art it is barely distinguished in order to be integrated into the process of accessing that work.
PR: Very true. But if it is not integrated, then we are dealing with a wrong work. That is, form can never exist alone. It does not make a work just for the sake of compositional rules. A work is composed in a certain way because it serves a content. And when I say content, I do not mean theme. I mean substance. For example, since we talked about photographs with visibly tragic themes. The photographer must find what form can bind with that particular theme to create a specific content he desires. The acrobatic search for a formic originality creates what we call a beautiful, original, impressive photograph. Something that the particular theme cannot withstand. I will not forget when I saw photographs from that period of famine in Africa a few years ago taken by a doctor who did not want to make art and who simply really with pain and with a recording intent took photos with his simple camera. The photographs worked perfectly. Without even passing through the viewer's mind if here we had some artist or artistic effort. On the contrary, when the photographer on one hand has a theme that he almost fears and why do I say this; There was another French photographer who made an exhibition with photographs from the same period, unknown photographer, insignificant, who declared at the opening of his exhibition that I raise my camera to put it between me and those horrible things I saw because I could not bear them. There form comes as a crutch. Crutch for the photographer and crutch for the viewer. The viewer is not facing the child who is dying or starving. He is facing a beautiful setup. And if the viewer is also a photographer, he appreciates it even more and begins to notice the good print, the diagonal lines, the references, and the symbolism. If a photographer tries to explore the possibilities of form, he never does it only through form. He always does it in cooperation with a subject he is photographing. He never forgets what Winogrand said, in front of me I have life. When you have life in front of you, and life means also road, vase, nude, and everything, I look at what I have in front of me. This leads me to the essence in the great photographer the form is imposed by what is in front of him.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy started as a lawyer in his native Hungary, continued as a key figure of the Bauhaus alongside Walter Gropius in Germany in the 1920s, and ended up transferring the European art revolution to Chicago, where he lived and taught as an American citizen from 1937 until his premature death in 1946. Although he initially experimented with photographic materials according to the spirit of the time, creating photograms, i.e., photographs without the intervention of a camera, he quickly became fascinated by the power of the image and moved on to classical photography. If the photograms alone are enough to convince us of the originality and inventiveness of the versatile artist that was Nagy, they would not be able to introduce an artistic creation of the significance of his photographic work. Nagy, in an era when the search for formalist values was the established dimension of artistic creation, managed to transform his extreme formal acrobatics into content with implications far more substantial than simple geometric balance. He thus proved that in the hands of a gifted and intelligent creator, even the exaggeration of form can be tamed and constitute the internal value of the work.
Florence Henri is the charming example of an artist whose life and interests exceed the limits of a country and a medium. Born in America to a German mother and French father, she lived from a young age in many cities and was involved with the piano, painting, and photography close to the greatest artists of the interwar period. From Marinetti to Mondrian, Mayakovsky, or Leger. However, her inclusion in the Bauhaus school and her acquaintance with Moholy-Nagy proved to be the most important milestone in her life since under the guidance of this excellent teacher she definitively chose photography as her expressive medium. Florence Henri, although nurtured with the principles of painting, sought the plastic values of the photographic medium not through pictorial painting imitations. She literally played with form, using mirrors to extend and distort the photographic image of objects and portraits she captured. She constructed optical illusions where the two-dimensional or three-dimensional significance of the image or reality lost its meaning, and the disorientation of the viewer's eyes contributed to the morphological dynamism of the result. Florence Henri, although the most well-known female artist of this talent-producing mechanism that was Bauhaus, did not achieve a corresponding fame and died rather forgotten at an old age. However, her work today is treated with new respect, and her formalist searches are recognized by photographers who find that many creative innovations that concern them today had already constituted the content of her photographic work.
Perhaps we could help someone who is listening to us find in their mind, when formalism acquires a negative and when it acquires a positive dimension. The search for form as the starting point of the work is often negative. That is, in the process of producing a work, a photograph, the form is imposed tangled with what the photographer really wants to express. It is very dangerous and I would say experimental, and the experimental stage does not interest us. It interests the photographer very much but not the public. It is therefore a very experimental stage that deals with form as a construction. It is not possible to create form and to be moved by the form. The form is a spring for producing work. The form is a garment for dressing a work. The composition must eventually become a work. If it remains composition, it is simply acrobatics.
AP: I recently had a discussion with a Greek painter and we both realized that ultimately if the content does not find the form that suits it, it remains meaningless. It remains suspended.
PR: If we recall a definition given by Bresson for photography which I roughly paraphrase, he says that photography is the verification, the realization of an event that exists, is significant, and the meaning that this event takes through the way it is presented. If we analyze this somewhat, it means that there is something significant that makes me photograph and this becomes significant in a different way through how I photograph it. The what and the how of photography must always be tied together. That is, in a photograph by Bresson a minor thing of reality under his lens microscope gains the significance of an event and this is an important thing in photography that operates through the mutation of values. This significant photographic event gets a plastic verification through its composition. And then we have its definitive expression. If the composition is made without the substrate of a significant photographic event, and I emphasize photographic so as not to be misunderstood by the viewers, then we will have a suspended form. And in a more emotional tone than this strict one that Bresson has, there is another American photographer, not Ansel Adams but Robert Adams, very good although less known, who says form is beautiful because it helps us confront our fear that life could be chaos. So nothing would make sense. And of course, this means that while you are looking through your lens and with small movements you correct your frame, a calmness, a balance is created. And the moment you feel this balance subconsciously that is the moment you press the button. This is what Bresson says, the mind, the heart, and the hand are in a straight line.
Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was the most significant Soviet photographer and a prominent figure in the European avant-garde of our early century. Married to painter Varvara Stepanova, influenced by painters Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, he joined the movement of Russian Futurism, one of its most important representatives. However, he later abandoned painting in favor of photography, which he encountered through typography and photomontage. Fully committed to the Soviet revolution, he tried to find new aesthetic paths as he believed the new social order imposed by the socialist change required. His ideas, too advanced for the regime, cost him public disapproval with the accusation of being influenced by Western formalism. It was indeed true that Rodchenko came into contact with Nagy's work, and his photographs resembled much of Bauhaus. Nevertheless, his aesthetic through the morphological search that characterizes his work, apart from the very particular physiognomy it gives him, managed to succeed as John Sarkowski had observed that in contemporary photography form becomes content. Perhaps this is based on the fact that his innovations were not due to a desire to impress but rather his romantic belief that he had a duty to serve with his enthusiasm and passion the new aesthetic that such a significant political change brought to Europe. His experimental aestheticism also had a mythical dimension, something that although every revolution should provoke, yet every revolution fears. The strange angles of shooting from above or below, the diagonal placements of his subjects were not geometric games but literally new visual perceptions. After all, as he himself said, many know what to photograph but very few know how to photograph it.
The photographic work of Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher began more than 30 years ago but became more known in recent years simultaneously with the work of their new students from the Düsseldorf school and also after the public and critics became acquainted with the conceptual and post-modern tendencies that prevailed last decade. However, the typology, i.e., the faithful descriptive repetition of similar or related subjects, owes nothing to these trends. Nor is it something new in photography or generally in art. After all, typology is a necessity for every artist because on one hand they have the desire to ascertain an order in the world or even attempt to impose it themselves, and on the other hand because the artist is always a collector. The Becher couple photographed buildings and machinery of the industrial landscape, isolating them from their surroundings using a large camera always characteristic for its almost sterile and precise capture under a covered sky to avoid any extraneous illuminative play, repeating similar images of a similar object or facets from different angles of the same object. This clinical description generates images of plastic beauty, leaves a scientific index of cultural points, and creates aesthetic question marks about the mode of operation of juxtaposed serial and not narrative sequence images.
Artwork cannot exist without significant and I would say intense form. If it is impressive, it is wrong. Non-existent is impossible in a good artwork. Form is always present and the dynamic composition. The more discreet, the more effective. It is impossible not to have content. It is impossible not to have even hyper-realistic elements, a moment's touch since art and mainly photography is almost by definition I would say hyper-realistic. And I say mainly photography because its hyper-realism is provocative. A moment's touch displays a three-dimensional reality as a two-dimensional version of it, i.e., fake. It is impossible not to have meaning and it is impossible not to have a theme. All this, however, in the course of the work is overturned and overturned in order to reach a very complex amalgam where everything tends to emerge and everything is subordinated by the next. Whatever protrudes too much risks taking the work underneath or in exceptional cases these tendencies of the elements of the work to autonomize as long as they do not autonomize they create a very beautiful tension. But there we are already at another charming point of art and I would say a lot of photography because I perceive it myself as well where the artist plays on a tightrope. That is, when an artist conducts a formalistic search, he always runs the risk of either making a masterpiece or falling into the abyss. Because either he will produce a work with a very great tension while the form tends to autonomize or he will produce a work where the form has autonomized, so the work will be weak or in the opposite case a work that will not make sense. But I think every great artist plays on a tightrope, that is, he risks.
AP: Yes, and I am impressed by the fact that such elements of morphological research are found in very great photographers like Kertesz for example. I look at his famous fork or I look at various other works of his on the streets of New York or in squares or windows which without this morphological research would be cliché.
PR: Would anyone ever dare to say that Kertesz is a formalist? Nevertheless, as you have observed, he has an extremely intense form and I do not know if it is Bresson or someone else who called him a geometer. But never did a viewer feel that this almost discreetly tender photograph of Kertesz has such strict geometry behind it. As for the fork you mentioned, which is one of Kertesz's exceptional photographs, this is an example of a photograph that moves on a razor's edge. It could be very wrong, too much pre-chewed food, too symbolic. It could throw us out with the ease that an advertising photograph does. On the other hand, would anyone dare to treat this photograph as a cutlery advertisement?
AP: Certainly not.
PR: And its great strength is that with its internal challenge, as if winking slyly at us, it says look what photography can do.